Scraping for a "preview" of a webpage - Python

Question

I'm indexing a list of links, these links update quite often so I'm automating thumbnails for the sites.

For most sites it's easy, as I just grab the biggest image on the page hoping it describes the content.

But other times there are videos as main content of the page.

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Does somebody have tips with dealing with this? That would be great!

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Regarding the usage of Webkit to create screenshots I found this

Answer 1

wkhtmltopdf uses an embedded copy of the WebKit render engine (used in Safari, Chrome etc.) to save a webpage to PDF, including all images (no Flash video though I guess). That could be a starting point for a much more accurate thumbnail.